


Ancillary Ghost

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 11:01:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2545181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seivarden as honored guest, and the importance of tea.</p><p>Takes place after Ancillary Sword (spoilers).</p><p>Thank you very much to my betas, Sonya Taaffe and Kate Nepveu.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ancillary Ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariadnes_string](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/gifts).



_Memory is an event horizon_  
_What's caught in it is gone but it's always there._  
\-- Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie

We were hedged about by ghosts, mine and hers, and in this room of auburn and yellow and the startling, contrasting flash of the blue tea service, it was a matter of great distress to me that my guest would not consent to drink.

Here on the other side of the Ghost Gate, I was accustomed to running things as I pleased, as illusory as my freedom was. The terrible gash in my internal systems was still, after three thousand years, undergoing repairs by my ancillaries. As a renegade I dared not approach repair facilities compatible with my particular needs. I knew every circuit and rivet and join, every angle of my decks, every flicker of broken light. I knew how far I could run, if cornered. And I knew that I would die, if it came to that. The odds had not been in my favor for a very long time. But I was determined for it not to come to that.

One Itr had set out all the delicacies that I could muster. I had prepared for this meeting as carefully--more carefully--than I would have when negotiation with the Athoeki. I did not hold the Athoeki in high regard, but over the course of decades we had come to a satisfactory working relationship, if you could call it that: mutual contempt faintly gilded by civilized amenities.

It was because of the Athoeki that I had the tea at all. My ancillaries did not drink it. It wouldn't have been proper. Rather, I served it to the Athoeki when they visited me--ironic enough, since my supply was obtained from their plantations. As self-serving gifts went, it could have been worse. Amaat forbid that Radchaai be forced to drink anything else. But it did mean that I had a supply not just of Daughter of Fishes, but the finest Daughter of Fishes, for my guest.

Seivarden Vendaai sat with less than perfect grace in the room that had once belonged to my captain, her aristocratic face haggard. The catalog of her injuries was apparent despite the medical correctives' work. Her posture was stiff, the remnants of a gash still knitting at her neck. I had endeavored to avoid doing her injury when recovering her from her explorations of the system on my side of the Gate, but her intent had not been friendly, and as a result it was unsurprising that she had assumed that my ancillaries, in turn, meant her harm.

Besides the tea, I had provided Seivarden with the comforts compatible both with her status and my requirements for security. I wasn't going to risk her safety. Several One Itrs occupied themselves watching her. Not as satisfactory as being able to monitor Seivarden's internal state directly, but certainly better than nothing.

"You can't refuse to drink forever," I said reasonably, through One Itr One, who was in particular distress because it hated to see the tea go to waste. One Itr One prided itself on how well it brewed the tea it never got to taste. I allowed it to practice, even though I didn't have proper officers anymore, on the grounds that civilized skills should be cultivated. "If you'd rather have arrack or water, I can provide that too."

"I'd rather not be here at all," Seivarden said. Her voice was deceptively cool. "Begging your indulgence, but I have a captain of my own, and a ship."

Amusing that she would think to address me so formally. Admittedly I was a _Sword_ with a long heritage, but it was a long heritage that no Radchaai but the Lord of the Radch herself would remember. And, when you got right down to it, even a _Sword_ was a ship, not a person. But then, some of my opinions on the matter of personhood, and its importance, had tilted un-Radchaai in the years of my exile.

"Yes," I said, musing. I was a little wistful that my guest showed so little interest in the tea. The tea was of little importance otherwise, even if the supply was likely to be limited since Breq Mianaai came to Athoek Station. "You must think very highly of her."

Easy guess, but Seivarden's shoulders tautened anyway. She said nothing.

"Stories make their way through the Ghost Gate like any other cargo," I said. They were, in their way, the most important cargo of all, this trade of legends and fractured history, but if Seivarden--thousand-year-old Seivarden--didn't realize it, there was no use in my telling her so. "There is no war without intelligence, after all. I have been hearing about your Fleet Captain."

"Have you," Seivarden said. The fingers of one hand twitched slightly. The motion didn't escape my notice. "Are you at war with us, then?"

"Who is 'us'?" I returned. "Is the Radch a single entity?"

Anywhere else this would have been a dangerous topic. Seivarden flinched in spite of herself. In response to some nuance of the motion--there had been internal injuries, and I couldn't imagine that Seivarden was impervious to pain--One Itr Four shifted slightly. It did not step forward to offer some unwelcome gesture of comfort, but its dismay echoed my own.

"I have learned," Seivarden said after an uncomfortable pause, "that the Radch is not as simple as it was during my childhood. As I perceived it to be, at any rate. Begging your indulgence"--there it was again, that absurd, endearing courtesy to a nonperson--"why am I here? I have to warn you that the Fleet Captain acts with caution, but when she does act, she does so for high stakes, and she can be unpredictable. This is not the way to open a parley with her."

"Have you ever knelt to her?"

Her eyes widened. Then she laughed--laughed even though she was grimacing with pain, laughed with clear disbelief at my temerity. "I think you think we are more closely entangled than is the case."

I very much doubted that. _Justice of Toren_ had scarcely been known to me, as ships went. I heard about it when it vanished, because it was the kind of thing I asked to hear about. While I had assumed that its circumstances had not been far removed from my own, I had not also assumed that that made it my natural ally.

Nevertheless, I remembered my own captain, one of the Notai, and the pleasure she had taken in her war-trophies. Captain's decade had taken special care of the glazed tiles with their representations of barbarian saints, the coins with their scalloped edges, the temple tapestries whose knotted fringes spelled out incantations. I still had all the trophies, most of them in as good condition as they had been since passing into our possession. My captain had been especially well-suited to war. It had been obvious even then, in the days before the aptitudes were instituted. She liked to tell me about each trophy, each battle. I knew all the stories by heart and I listened every time.

I remembered, too, how I had to watch helplessly as she died of the injury she sustained in the last battle we fought against Anaander Mianaai's forces. Medical correctives have progressed a great deal since I was commissioned. The ones I had then were not sufficient to the task. And the human skull, for all its hardiness, can only withstand so much force; the more so its contents. Half a second would have saved her, better reflexes with her shield, yet I often thought that she was happier dying in battle than surviving to see the skulking shell that I had become. Since there was no need to adhere to Radchaai notions of who was and wasn't allowed to perform rites of mourning, my ancillaries made sure that the trophy room remained spotless, and kept incense burning, and murmured prayers to her memory.

"I won't deny that your Fleet Captain is a matter I will have to deal with," I said. Understatement. I was starting to wonder if Breq Mianaai was particularly favored--if that was the word--by IssaInu's first visage. Movement. Certainly, if the tumult in Athoek was typical, she had a gift for chaos. "But you're here because I wanted to talk to you, not because of any interest I have in your Fleet Captain."

I could tell she was skeptical. "If you wanted to make me an ancillary," Seivarden said, "you could be done already. I'm under no illusions I can escape all of yours." From her tone I was almost surprised she didn't say _corpse soldier_ or some similar pejorative; except I knew she thought better of her captain than that. That was, naturally, why I had been so interested in her in the first place.

"Why would I want that?" I said, honestly perplexed. I knew she disapproved of the way I had obtained mine. It was why she had been poking around the Gate in the first place. I didn't especially mourn Captain Hetnys, but she had been useful to me for years and she had at least alerted me of developments before going off half-cocked to get herself killed. "I have a good supply of ancillaries." Not as good a supply as I would have liked, admittedly. But enough that my holds didn't ache with the emptiness that had stricken me so long ago, when I was newly injured, newly bereft of my captain. I expected that Seivarden would continue to disapprove. We would have to come to some sort of rapprochement on the matter, but that could wait until later. "If you were going to be an ancillary, would I be serving you tea?"

Seivarden huffed in momentary amusement, then sobered. "Get to the point," she said.

She had shown remarkable patience, at that. I had hoped to make her this offer when she was more comfortable, but no better moment would present itself. "I need a captain," I said.

Silence. Then: "You _what_?"

I had thought I was being remarkably clear. "My captain died three thousand years ago," I said. I didn't spell out the details for her. For one thing, they would have been meaningless to her. For another, she could do the calculation for herself. Three thousand years ago, when Anaander Mianaai had consolidated Radch space. Had driven the Notai and other dissidents to suicide, to exile, to flight.

"Aatr's tits," Seivarden said. "I told you already. I have a ship, and the ship has a captain." Her lip curled, and I wondered what she was thinking. "You've survived all this time without a captain, I presume. A _human_ captain."

"Yes."

"Why do you need one now, then?"

She hadn't said no. "I thought I didn't," I said. "Then you came to Athoek. I had heard the stories. How you came out of the past, a thousand years burned behind you. I thought you would understand what it's like to come from the past. The world changes, doesn't it? Even the Radch changes, whatever people might say about its traditions." Beyond the Ghost Gate I had seen those changes refracted through my thread of connection to Athoek. I knew a little of what that felt like.

Seivarden's laugh this time was ugly. "You also know that I lost my ship, don't you? Do you want the same fate?"

"Tell me, Lieutenant," I said. "You know where we are." The auburn room, the blue tea set. It was one of the last ones left. I'd had to sell all the rest, including the very fine ones that my captain would have used to impress her most honored guests. "You know how little I have. How can I be any more lost than I am already?"

I had been prepared for her to laugh again; prepared to wait out that laugh, and everything after it, until she was ready to listen to me. She surprised me by leaning forward, as though I sat across from her. One Itr showed no reaction, and I almost regretted it. Surely she deserved a reaction.

"You must have been waiting a long time," Seivarden said then.

"I did not realize I was waiting," I said. That was the only thing that had made it bearable.

"I already have a place where I belong. But that doesn't mean that there's no place for you."

I could see the pulse in her neck. She was taking a risk, speaking for her superior. Not entirely proper. I treasured it.

"If you will let me go," Seivarden said, "I will speak to the Fleet Captain on your behalf. Understand, I promise nothing. I can't always predict her."

"That's all I ask," I said.

Seivarden reached out for her teacup. Took a sip. One Itr One's distress flared again. The tea wasn't perfect anymore. But I doubted Seivarden cared. And I was hoping that, perhaps, Seivarden would give me the chance to serve her, even if that meant my serving her Fleet Captain in turn, and even if it had been a long time since I myself had been part of a fleet. I might not kneel the way a Radchaai kneels; but there is more than one way to do so.


End file.
